One night after the Knicks won a particularly intense game, I saw a video showing Zohran Mamdani celebrating at a dinner, looking less like the mayor of the most important city in the world and more like a DJ who is super fun at parties. The vibe around him was electric. The whole thing looked like a blast.
A few days later, I saw his Instagram. He had run a lottery for affordable World Cup tickets for ordinary New York residents and was posting the moment he met them in the stadium. Pure marketing genius perfectly produced.
I keep thinking about the people I know who despise and mock him, saying that people will soon get tired of him. I wanted to shake them. They are the ones who are going to lose. Not because Mamdani is right, but because they do not understand what they are dealing with. They are like the people alarmed by Trump who spent 2015 mocking his hair and his voters, and they mocked their way into a decade of defeats.
If you find Mamdani’s platform dangerous – and I do – then you do not have the luxury of not taking him seriously. If you find the rapid rise of the DSA alarming – and I do – then you also cannot sit this one out.
This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Korach, has something to say about the moment we find ourselves in. But its most important message is not a guide for how to defeat a populist. It’s a challenge: are we willing to do what it actually takes?
Korach was Moses’s cousin, a Levite of standing, and a quintessential populist. His challenge to Moses sounds seductively reasonable: “The entire congregation is holy, all of them, and God is among them – why do you raise yourselves above the community of God?”
It’s a good line. After the covenant, weren’t all of Israel in some sense elevated? Wasn’t there something presumptuous about Moses and Aharon holding permanent religious authority?
There are three lessons to take from this story for our moment:
The First Lesson: The Grievances Are Real
Anyone who responds to Mamdani by dismissing his voters as dupes or his platform as incoherent is making a big mistake. Taking Mamdani seriously means taking seriously what is driving his support: the anger about a rigged economy, corrupt politicians, institutions that protect insiders, and a city where working people cannot afford to live.
Some of our greatest teachers model this by taking Korach’s argument seriously. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, in Likutei Sichot, puts it plainly: Korach was right. All of Israel stood at Sinai. The holiness is real. Where Korach went wrong was in thinking that real holiness needs no structure to shine.
Our tradition doesn’t dismiss Korach as a demagogue and moves on. It didn’t matter that Korach himself was the child of privilege - one of the Levites, in the same way that it doesn’t matter that Mamdani has grown up in luxury and wealth. The commentators engage Korach’s argument because an argument that moves people deserves to be understood before it is countered. That is the posture we need now.
The Second Lesson: Don’t Fight on His Terrain
So what does Moses do in response?
He falls on his face. This year I read this as a recognition that he has no easy reply — and that reaching for one anyway would make things worse. You cannot out-populist a populist from a position of authority. Saying “I am more of the people than you think” never works. It’s defensive and concedes the populist’s framing even while trying to escape it.
Moses understood something that too many of Mamdani’s opponents have not yet learned. You cannot counter charisma with a policy memo.
Moses’s response – proposing that Korach and his followers bring fire pans and let God adjudicate – is the deft pivot of someone who knows he cannot win on the populist’s playing field. Instead of conceding, he proposes different terms entirely: Let us not argue about who is holier. Let us find a test we both accept and let it decide.
Moses moves the contest from the domain where Korach is strongest — the crowd, the slogan, the emotional charge — to a domain with objective rules that apply equally to both sides.
We don’t have fire pans. But we have primaries. They are messier and more democratic, but grounded in the same logic. The answer to Mamdani’s charisma is not more charisma — it is relentless strategy and organization.
We can defeat DSA in primary races decided by a few thousand votes, in city council seats nobody is paying attention to, in the slow, unglamorous machinery that actually determines who governs. That is what a shared standard of legitimacy looks like.
The Third Lesson: Go to the Tents
The Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin records that even though Moses was the aggrieved party, he tried to persuade the people before God decided the dispute. He didn’t approach Korach, but went to the tents of Datan and Aviram – the people in the orbit of the rebellion who might still be reached.
They rebuffed him. “We will not go up.”
When I read this, I realized that it was only after Moses deployed his legs that day in the wilderness that divine vindication came.
We learn: God does not intervene to save people who have not tried.
Now ask yourself: are we going to the tents?
The Jewish community has responded to the DSA’s rise with op-eds, donor calls, and WhatsApp groups full of alarmed zionists. The majority in our community are still more likely to complain about Mamdani than to canvass against DSA. We are nowhere close to doing what Moses did.
Going to the tents means showing up in the neighborhoods where the DSA’s support is being built – not to argue about Israel, but to talk about what people actually care about. It means doing the boring, repetitive and unglamorous work of political organizing: attending community board meetings, building relationships, and yes – knocking on doors.
It means the Jewish normies I wrote about last summer – the ones who vote but don’t organize, who care but don’t show up enough – actually cross the Jordan.
We have not tried this. Not really. Not at the scale or the seriousness the moment requires.
The DSA did not build its infrastructure overnight. They spent years going to the tents – literally – while the people most threatened by their agenda were at brunches and donor dinners.
They organized city council races that nobody was paying attention to. They showed up at community board meetings that drew twelve people. They did the work that frankly doesn’t feel like winning.
And then they won.
In New York and across the country, the DSA is running candidates in races that will be decided by a few thousand votes. Some of these races are still winnable right now, with the resources and networks the Jewish community possesses – if we choose to deploy them the way Moses did that day in the wilderness.
But here is the thing: we have to want to win badly enough to do what winning requires.
Korach’s rebellion ended when the earth opened. We are not getting that kind of help. We are going to have to go to the tents ourselves.
Shabbat Shalom,
Mijal
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.